1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a communication system for providing information a of medical doctor's questions to patients, in which the communication system includes a terminal apparatus for a medical doctor, a terminal apparatus for a patient and a database server apparatus which are connected to each other through a communication network. More particularly, the present invention relates to a communication system for providing information of a medical doctor's questions to patients for the purpose of remote medical doctor's questions, in which a terminal apparatus for a medical doctor remotely transmits queries to a terminal apparatus for a patient and remotely receives and outputs patient's responses to the queries from the patient terminal apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, medical doctor's questions to a patient have required the patient to go to the hospital or clinic or have required the medical doctor to visit the patient's home, so that the medical doctor and the patient have to meet each other face to face, which therefore leads to a considerable loss of time, such as traveling time and waiting time.
In order to solve this problem, a multi-user remote health monitoring system is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,101,478. In this system, a server apparatus generates and stores script programs containing queries to patients, such as HTML that can be read on the Web. A terminal apparatus for a patient downloads the script program stored in the server apparatus and thereafter executes the script program. Then, the patient answers the queries displayed on a display of the patient terminal apparatus, and thereafter, answer data is transmitted from the patient terminal apparatus to the server apparatus.
Moreover, a remote diagnostic system is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 9-84771. In this system, a center apparatus comprising a computer transmits a checklist containing medical doctor's questions for a patient to a remote terminal apparatus. The remote terminal apparatus performs a measurement on the patient and informs the patient of the medical doctor's questions in accordance with the received checklist according to patient and thereafter transmits the patient's measurements and answers to the center apparatus, which then stores the measurements and answers to permit a medical doctor to carry out a diagnosis based on the measurements and answers.
However, these systems of the prior arts have a problem in that the systems cannot retain security since the systems are configured to transmit the script program containing queries or the checklist containing medical doctor's questions for the patient to the patient remote terminal apparatus.